Writing and a Question to be Answered

 For almost 13 years now, I have been writing like a madman, trying to catch up on the time I turned away from writing fiction. More recently, I avoided reading Adam O’Fallon Price's Why Is This Story Being Told? from The Millions. I cringed when I read the following:

And yet it captures something about a lot of writing, even writing that is good, or “good”—well-considered, well-phrased, and well-paced. Lots of good writing has this inert, pointless quality, and sometimes otherwise amateurish, inept writing has a curious vibrancy. Whatever the case, the first test that any piece of writing must pass is answering, in some way, why it exists.

I cringed out of fear that my reasons - to tell the stories of people who would not otherwise be heard, to make some sense out of my life - were insubstantial. "Colonel Tom" keeps getting rejected, so I must not be getting something across in my fiction. Mr. Price follows the preceding paragraph with this:

To put it another and possibly less clear way, all fiction has to do battle with its own fictional nature. There’s a minor absurdity inherent in the act of entering a world invented by another person, even if we ardently wish to enter such a world. As readers, we sense it in the beginning of any new book—the dipping of toes into the water, the wading in. It isn’t so much realism or factuality that pulls us beneath the fictional surface, but a kind of mysterious weight, the gravity of a story that, for whatever reason, needs to be told. Narrative lacking this quality cannot convince us to read past the bare fact of its arbitrariness, its status as something created. It sits there, only making us aware of the infinitude of stories that can be told, when a good story does the opposite, narrowing the universe to its singular vision and significance.

Okay, I understand this - either from Midwestern practicality or my being brought up in a Protestant home. Either, both, require a justification for any artistic endeavor. There must be a practical point, even if that point is artistic, that connects with the reader in such a way that they will overlook the frivolity of indulging in a book or film or play or art exhibit rather than spending their time in the pursuit of the practical life.

Mr. Price continues into a long discussion, with example of implied narrative motivation. I think I only have come close to using this in "True Love Ways Gone Astray" - I do not use first-person all that often. But then this story had a frame when it was first written a bit less than a decade ago. Still, I miss the mark of Price's examples.

Except, I think I may be back in the game, if I understand these two paragraphs:

This suggests a productive approach to looking at the effect of various ways of telling a story. As stylized as the written word has become over the centuries, at its heart, narrative is based on oral storytelling. We still, on some level, encounter fiction transmitted via the intermediary of a book in the same way we encounter fiction as told to us by someone. It can be useful to imagine the author as a stranger who sits down beside us at a crowded bar. Berlin’s account seems intuitively true in this respect: if this stranger begins telling us about another stranger, it is simultaneously less engaging and more motivated—that is to say, we would infer that they have a good reason to be unloading this on us, even if in doing so they have to convince us to care about this other, described, person.

If, on the other hand, they simply begin talking about themselves and the kind of day they’ve had, the story they tell hinges purely on how interesting and arresting it is, and until they command our full attention with their raconteurial power, we may wonder why we’re supposed to care. We may assume, as is often the case, that this person just likes to hear themselves talk.

That metaphor of talking to a stranger in a bar seems very useful to me - not to be any more boring in our writing than telling a story in a bar. Believe me, I have received those and fear I have given some of those, too. I have always worried about boring my readers. Whether they have been too kind in saying they were not bored, is another matter altogether, but hope springs eternal.

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